With Oracle Application Server Portal 10.1.4 still quite new, this 2006 Q1 issue of the Developer Services Newsletter focuses on various key features of this exciting release.

Out-of-the-box portlets now available with Oracle BPEL Process Manager 10.1.2.0.2!
Included in the recent release of Oracle BPEL Process Manager 10.1.2.0.2 is a provider that includes several prebuilt portlets to help you launch the integration of your BPEL processes with your portal. These portlets include the Oracle BPEL Console report portlets and Oracle BPEL Worklist Application portlets. You can learn all about them in Chapter 20 of the latest BPEL Process Manager Developer's Guide. Are you interested in even deeper integration? Be sure to read the sections on the Worklist APIs, Workflow Services, and Invoking a BPEL Process in the BPEL Developer’s Guide. Also remember that, with the availability of the Portal Content Management Event Framework APIs, you can now replace Portal content approval processes with a BPEL approval process.

For a glimpse at how customers, analysts, and consultants view process portals, read Process Portals: A New Way to See Business in the March/April issue of Oracle Magazine. Coming soon to Portal Center: code samples and technotes on these topics!

Brand your site with HTML Templates
Are you an OracleAS Portal page designer who is HTML savvy? If so, the new HTML template features of Portal 10.1.4 are meant for you. While OracleAS Portal continues to generate the necessary HTML to assist users who are unfamiliar with the language, page designers who want a very specific UI for their pages can now write their own HTML to define decoration for pages and the display of item-based content. Because this custom HTML is stored in the portal as templates, you can apply it to all pages for consistent branding.

HTML Templates support all standard HTML features such as declaring and calling JavaScript functions, referencing Macromedia Flash movies and animations, and adding a custom CSS. Using special <ORACLE> … </ORACLE> tags, you can also insert procedural PL/SQL code into your HTML.

Want to learn more? Read the section What are HTML Templates  in the Portal Users Guide . For hands-on training, try out Achieving Pixel-Perfect Page Design with HTML Templates, a self-paced Oracle By Example tutorial.

Create your own layout HTML for OmniPortlets
With the flexibility provided by the new HTML Layouts for OmniPortlet, a page designer has complete control over the UI of an OmniPortlet. HTML/CSS code can be used to define a layout on top of any data source to suit almost any publishing requirement. The example below uses Sortable Table, one of the out-of-the-box templates now available in OmniPortlet.

Supercharge your Portal environment with the Oracle Portlet Factory
Providing custom portlets that aggregate data and processes from enterprise applications such as SAP adds tremendous business value to a portal implementation. But building custom portlets can be a difficult and a time-consuming task.

To accelerate and simplify the development, deployment, and maintenance of custom and composite portlets, Oracle has recently released a new Eclipse-based Rapid Application Development tool, the Oracle Portlet Factory. Thanks to a set of out-of-the-box Builders and Models, creating custom portlets that connect to SAP has never been easier. And no Java knowledge is required to build portlets that are native to Oracle Portal (PDK-Java) or Standards-based (JSR 168). You can download Oracle Portlet Factory from OTN.